


Seven Weeks

by RavensWing



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: But also comfort, F/M, I am LIVING off the mutual pining that is happening in this ship right now, I'd say this is a hurt/comfort fic, Living, OKAY?!, Wyatt is not okay, and that is kind of what I am living for right now?, at least as long as Lucy isn't there, but A LOT of protective!wyatt, but it may mostly be hurt?, douchy writer is douchy, i don't think this is what tags are for but dammit this is how i am going to use them, this is totally wish fulfillment on my part
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 18:32:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14002044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RavensWing/pseuds/RavensWing
Summary: There is time and then there is torture.Wyatt Logan isn't sure which is which anymore.[ those 6 weeks between season 1&2 as a story told 100 words at a time.  ]





	1. Week One

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a writing exercise to try to get myself to focus on smaller tasks instead of overwhelmingly large pieces that make me want to curl up and die. 
> 
> Each week gets 100 words per week number (e.g. week one = 100 words, week two = 200 words) but each section within the week must only be 100 words. That makes no sense but this is who I am now. Buckle up. It's about to get stupid up in here.

Pain.

That is all he feels.

All he knows.

There is no ‘getting comfortable’.

There is now.

There was then.

There was her.

These are the three things he knows beyond a doubt.

The greatest of these are her: her eyes, her warmth, his failure.

She may as well be on the other side of the universe for all he can help her now.

If he even can help her.

Is she alive?

He doesn’t know. Yet he does.

She is. She has to be because if she isn’t…

He closes his eyes.

The answer hurts more than his wounds.


	2. Week Two

He has been injured before. 

He is used to pain, but this is different. This is failure.

Failure to complete a mission.

Failure to bring back Jessica.

Failure to keep Lucy safe.

He won’t admit which ones pains him the most even though anyone could guess. 

Moving around is easier now, muscles loosening from their permanently braced and locked position, but he is still looking for a fight. 

He has ripped his stitches more than once, been threatened by the doctor on staff, but he doesn’t care.

Nothing hurts more than knowing she is out there and not with him.

* * *

The haze is lifting. Whatever medication they’d been administering it seems they are now weaning him off and he is only now realizing just how fuzzy everything had been the past two weeks. 

It had been a wash of drifting in and out of consciousness, in and out of seeing her play against his eyelids. 

Her: Lucy. 

Her: Jessica. 

He sucks a breath and feels each cracked rib as sharp as if he had just taken a blow. 

He breathes again, deeper this time, and focuses on that radiant torment. He understands this kind of pain and he welcomes it.


	3. Week Three

They have stopped trying to patch him up, the doctor and nurses. 

He doesn’t want them to. 

Agent Christopher gives him worried looks tempered only by the maternal knowledge that this is something only time can heal.

Time.

He’d laughed the first time he had heard the details of his mission with Mason Industries. It had been the first time he’d laughed since Jessica. He is not laughing now.

He can feel time around him like a vice keeping him place, keeping him from Lucy.

She is out there, but he is here, and that is what is killing him.

* * *

Rufus is here, too.

And Jiya.

And he supposes that could be a boon if he let it but as it is it feels more like a pebble in his shoe - a grain of sand in his eye - than anything.

Maybe he’s being some shade of selfish, but that does not change his feelings. Seeing them reminds him of who’s missing.

They are here. 

They are safe (well as safe as any of them can be) but he does not want to be safe. Not when Lucy is out there in Rittenhouse’s dark embrace. 

Not when he cannot protect her.

* * *

Jiya’s hand lingers on Rufus’s shoulder and Wyatt tries to not let it irritate him. They should be happy. He wants them to be happy, but maybe he wants to be happy too. 

He hasn’t felt that way, like he might actually deserve to feel something beyond lingering numbness, since Jessica’s murder. He knows that he won’t feel that way again until Lucy is back. 

He has to get her back.

He breathes deeply, relishes the pain that lingers. It keeps him sharp, focused, in the endless monotony of the bunker. 

Rufus kisses Jiya’s cheek.

Wyatt looks the other way.


	4. Week Four

Weeks are one thing, months are something entirely different.

Weeks are manageable.

Weeks are simple.

Months are endless.

Months are torture.

Seven days are nothing compared to thirty (he does not remember sunlight). He can’t help but pick at the scabs on his arms, his torso, his back. He is itching a scratch deeper than what lives on his skin and he kind of hopes it gets infected.

He kind of hopes he dies.

It’d be easier.

It’d be.

But then Lucy would be out there alone, and Rufus, too. He cannot do that to them.

He grabs his Neosporin.

* * *

He keeps an empty bed for her in his room (never assumes she will want to share his bed, never could even entertain the thought). It just sits there across from his, made and waiting with his best sweats folded in the corner.

If she wants to find another corner of the bunker that will be fine.

If she wants to wear Rufus’ clothes, or Jiya’s, that would be fine too.

He just wants her taken care of, no matter what. No matter by whom.

It takes more than a few days to convince himself that this is the truth.

* * *

“When do you think The Lifeboat will be back online?”

He’s asked this question before, will ask it again.

"Hello to you, too." Rufus looks up from a pile of papers covered with numbers, lines, and graphs. His eyes are bloodshot.

"Do you think it will be soon?"

Rufus sighs not dismissing Wyatt's brusqueness but also realising he won't get what he's looking for. They are all too tired to fight right now.

"I want her back, too."

The hair on the back of Wyatt’s neck stands up.

“Whatever. I just want to get the hell out of this hole.”

* * *

The empty bed in his room taunts him.

Like a bully poking his chest on the playground.

Like a feast behind glass and he’s starving.

Every day it sits empty reminds him that Lucy still isn’t there, but he leave it anyway. He refuses to touch it.

He wants her to know when he brings her back that he’d never given up on her.

He will never give up on her, knows she will never give up on him.

He lies on his side each night (he still can’t lie on his back) and pretends he can hear her breathing.


	5. Week Five

Time is not a healer.

Time is a numbing agent.

The wounds still exist even if you do not feel them the same way you did at first, and he does. He feels each tear, each cut, as if it is fresh.

Each:

_Not yet._

Every:

_Not now._

Cut differently than it did before.

He’d been on missions before. He’d been cut off from those he’d sworn to protect, but never like this - never on the run. He itches to prove himself.

He itches.

When Rufus tells him there is blood on the back of his shirt he ignores him.

* * *

There are lots of things to be done in the bunker, it’s just that he’s not equipped to do any of them.

He cannot do physics. He cannot factor equations around the space/time continuum. He’s not good at welding - especially not the precision work needed for The Lifeboat. One time when they were dating he had helped Jessica add her favorite song to her MySpace account (Little Moments by Brad Paisley), but he’s miles from a computer whiz. He does not understand quantum _anything_.

It’s driving him insane.

It’s driving everyone else insane too and he can feel it.

* * *

He walks in on Rufus and Jiya in the shower and has never been more thankful for a cinderblock wall.

“Sorry.” He mumbles as he ducks out.

Ten seconds later a dripping wet Rufus is out in the hall with him, sputtering and probably hard beneath the towel clutched at this waist but Wyatt keeps his eyes trained at the ceiling.

"Dude. Knock much?"

"There's a chair in there, right?"

Rufus nods, not following.

“Put it in front of the door. Then if open the door and hit it - I know that you are hitting - well - that."

He walks away

* * *

In one of the small rooms of the bunker there is an old-timey exercise bike where the handlebars pump the pedals as much as the pedals pump the handlebars and he finally knows what it feels like to be a hamster.

He rides that thing for _hours_ , gears grinding, bearings squeaking, and it still hardly takes the edge off. He does push ups until his arms fail and he collapses on the (disquietingly and somewhat disgustingly) damp floor.

Still.

He tells himself it is better than the alternative - even if he is not entirely sure what that could possibly be.

* * *

At night (even if there’s no day or night underground) he lays on his side in bed and thinks about her smile. He thinks about its brilliance, how it barely fits in the delicate confines of her face. He hadn’t noticed it at first. He’d been to focused on ignoring everything about her, but it had been for naught.

He had noticed.

The first time he did it hit him like a tidal wave, full force and fatal. He can’t remember the last time he’d seen someone smile with their entire body.

Actually, he can.

He doesn’t sleep that night.


	6. Week Six

The showers smell like sulfur. The whole bunker does and he not certain that this is not hell.

He is not certain of most things these days.

He supposes that’s to be expected when one has gone through what he has, but still. He can feel himself splitting into pieces. He can feel his skin shrinking around him until he cannot move - cannot breathe. Everything is too tight, too bright. Slamming his fist into the molding tile seems like the only sane option.

His bloody knuckles seem to be of a different opinion.

Jiya looks scared.

Good.

He’s scared, too.

* * *

Connor Mason may be brilliant, or have been brilliant, or may be brilliant again but as far as Wyatt is concerned he can go suck an egg. If he’d had the common sense to just leave time alone, to leave the past in the past then he would not feel like this.

He would not feel.

He’d be back to floating in the blissful indifference of not caring what happened to anyone.

He’d be free.

So when Mason burns dinner again on his turn for KP duty is all Wyatt can do to not shove a spatula down his throat.

* * *

There is more than one way to skin a cat.

There is more than one way to break a man.

The idea of freedom is so much worse when you don’t actually have it - when you cannot walk through the doors shut around you.

He tries at first to obey, to abide, but he can feel her mouth - her sliding through his fingers - and he won’t break this promise. He’s broken too many. He won’t break this one, not while he is still breathing.

He doesn’t mean to rip the grinder from Rufus’ hand - but then again maybe he did.

* * *

At one point the idea of being court-martialed would have scared him shitless, but now it almost fills him with relief. He has his toe on the line and he is so close to stepping - no - _leaping_ to the other side that his body hums with possibility.

Agent Christopher seems to think that her words will keep him there, that she has any sway, and he’ll let her think that.

Truth is the only reason he doesn’t take that elevator to the surface is that he knows that Lucy is alive and Rufus is close and he’s bringing her back.

* * *

 

To see her again is like he’s been a man underwater: heavy, weighted, unable to move freely. He’d imagined her face so many times, had fought to keep her alive despite protests, but to see her - to know she is alive and all right - it is more than he can bear.

When she goes to hug Rufus he is not jealous but he does not like it.

He wants to hold her forever.

He never wants to let her go.

He must, however. Her resolve is strong and he knows she is right.

That does not, however, make it easier.

* * *

 

He doesn’t hate guns. In fact, he is quite fond of them. He does, however, hate guns when they are pointed at Lucy. Something deep and dark tightens in his chest and it is all he can do to not explode.

He wonders how many shots he can get off in a second (three), which shots he should take (Emma, Lucy’s mom, the target), which shots she’d want him to take (none) and he is paralyzed.

No one has ever clouded his focus like this.

It’s no small miracle they make it out together once more.

But, somehow, they do.


	7. Week Seven

Her eyes are wide and glassy when they land in the bunker. All the things that have become so common, oppressive, are new to her and he guides her by the shoulders to the showers. Agent Christopher is there but he shakes her off.

Now’s not the time.

Lucy is small, somehow smaller than he remembered, and he wonders if she has lost weight.

He sets his clothes on the shower wall along with some soap Jiya has given him and leaves her be.

He leans his head back against the outside wall, listens to the water running, and wants.

* * *

He has imagined her so many times on that empty bed that he is tempted to pinch himself to believe she is really there. The thing that makes it real is how she sits. Normally she holds herself with such poise but now she is curled into herself.

His sweats dwarf her.

She looks like a child.

It takes everything inside of him not to crush her to him but to give her space.

He swallows the need to shield her from everything she is feeling, knows there is no way he can.

He knows grief when he sees it.

* * *

He can hardly breathe when he holds her. She takes his breath away. He gladly gives it as if somehow his breath can staunch her bleeding. As if, somehow, his breath can suck out the venom of her parent’s betrayal.

It’s wishful thinking but he will try. Dammit.

She turns his face, her mouth a breath away from his, and he knows this isn’t what she needs. She’s hurting.

She’s confused.

A hookup is not what she needs even if every cell of his body is screaming to just fall into it - to let it happen.

Then, Jiya walks in.

* * *

She blames herself for not stopping Rittenhouse. Everyone tells her otherwise, but he knows she doesn’t hear. He knows she is cataloguing each step she took that led them here.

“I should’ve killed him.” She says when they are alone. “I had the chance but I hesitated. Now who knows what he’ll do.”

She doesn’t do well with the future tense. She’s wired for the past.

“We’ll figure it out.”

“Will we?” Her eyes are glass plates and he’s falling into them.

“We will.”

Cold comfort, and he wants to hold her. He wants to kiss her.

Instead, he leaves.

* * *

He keeps his distance then not because he wants to be away from her but because being close to her is dangerous. He is kerosene. She is a spark. Together they will set this whole place on fire.

Besides, he cannot spend every waking moment with her.

That is impractical.

Instead he hovers in the background, listening to Jiya and Agent Christopher cypher through the Rittenhouse data they have uncovered - finding pressure points - charting missions. He visits his exercise bike. He showers. Come nightfall he knows there will be no avoiding her though.

He is already anticipating, dreading, that moment.

* * *

“You’re in love with her.” He’s playing Go Fish with Rufus for the thousandth time.

“Got any twos?” He pretends not to hear just as he had on the western front.

“You literally crossed centuries to go get her and you really want to play cards with me?”

Rufus has that omnipresent crease between his eyebrows. Wyatt thinks about making a botox joke but doesn’t.

“So - twos or no?”

Rufus tosses his cards onto the table and stands up.

“I've got a ‘you better go take care of Lucy because she needs you, you idiot’.”

For once, Wyatt is speechless.

* * *

She’s awake when he comes back into their room, curled knees to her chest on her bed.

He swallows.

“Lucy.” His voice is lower than expected and he never saw her coming.

Before he can flinch she’s on him, arms snaking around his neck and he is defenseless against her. His lips catch her hair, her temple, her cheek, her mouth and he feels her melt. He feels how much she trusts him, he trusts her. He doesn’t fight it.

She buries her face in his chest and he holds her.

For the first time in years - he is happy.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could write A LOT more but that is not the point. This was an exercise in brevity and lemme tell you that is a challenge in and of itself. I can't wait to see where this season takes us! I am so excited for some more amazing Lyatt moments I am swooning.


End file.
